Female Icarus
by Chyme for the Rhyme
Summary: Hajime doesn't wake up. And in the aftermath, Tsubasa spreads her wings and flies. Or at least tries to.
1. Flight

Hajime loses her last breath like a star in flight, one that falls, fritters and wheezes, like the dying ember of a firework.

Everyone is is there to watch her leave. But not one of them, not one, can get her to stay.

* * *

Tsubasa watches the coffin pass from hand to hand, wishing she were strong enough to stand and lay her palm flat on the surface. Wishing she were stronger still, to shoulder its weight and lift Hajime a little closer to the sky.

'I'm so sorry, so sorry,' she hears Gelsadra cry, his voice becoming lost in moments to a snuffling set of hiccups. His snot falls out in droplets of blue, the same shade as her NOTE, and Tsubasa shoves down the impulse to send it flying across the room. Losing it will do no good, not if it causes the promise she made to Hajime to fray and snap in two.

I will be a better Gatchaman, she thinks, and reaches out, letting the glove holding Gelsandra's hand crease within her own.

* * *

'There's no shame in it,' her Great-grandfather tells her later, uniting his words with an audible sniff. 'When I saw my brother laying there, stiff, as though he were made of paper and not skin, I had to turn and let the ground swallow my eyes. I could not look up to see the beauty of the sky for days. They called me a coward for it.'

'I'm not any braver,' she says, voice small and growing smaller as her Note weighs down in her pocket like a stone. 'I don't- you weren't a coward!'

He smiles, the wrinkles opening up round his mouth like a flower. 'No,' he says, 'but then, Tsubasa, I was not given the same wings to fly with that you were.'

* * *

Tsubasa stares at the chart, the circle glaring at her from within its divided lines of red and blue. The green wavers between them, a trickle of neutrality that barely presses back against the greedy cerulean sweeping up against its side.

'It's been decided! Gelsadra will leave earth!'

The world spins, wobbles. But Tsubasa's legs remain steady, comprised of an iron that forsook her weeks ago at the funeral of a girl she never really knew. People are talking she knows, the live studio audience jostling each other with gossip and gasps. And yet a blanket of hush seems to fall over her mind, giving her space to think.

 _If I were truly given wings to fly...then is it alright if I use them, sempai?_

She does not forget to bow, tears trembling on her face as she thanks everyone for voting, before informing them that she's sorry, really, awfully sorry, but that she can no longer share the same planet with them.

* * *

 _Who does she think she is?_

 _Stuck-up bitch._

 _Not fit to breath our air, is she?_

 _Roflcopter you know she's too busy sharing it with that alien loser!_

 _No, but isn't that like, paedophilia, now that he's not all aged-up anymore?_

 _you go girl! living the dream! from shotacon to bishie-heaven with one twirl of that superhero cape!_

 _Ew. There's always one, isn't there?_

 _kick the race traitor out I say! let her be a NEET in space!_

 _Erm, you meant species-traitor, right?_

 _LoOL! OWNED!_

 _shut up gramma-nazi._

 _It's grammar. And make me._

* * *

Tsubasa doesn't understand space ships. She doesn't understand the whirl of noise that surrounds her, or the way purple lights up the strips on the floor, or even the way she can taste gravity, and the way it falls on her tongue like a copper weight, smelling of fried batter even as it roots her down into her seat.

'Don't worry, Tubasa,' chirps Gelsadra, looking so solid, so _serious_ , that for a moment Tsubasa can still glimpse the adult he pretended to be, trapped within his face. 'I won't let you die.'

But she doesn't have a reply ready for him. Not for anyone, not since the announcement. They had all looked at her like a stranger, except for Utsutsu, the girl simply staring down, as her hair fell off her forehead in a green slide that cut at her eyes.

Coward, the internet message-boards might have called her. But not Tsubasa. Not now.


	2. Crash

The first world they find is made of water, steam rolling off the waves in an aqua mist. But it feels warm to the touch, and across the bobbing coil of its currents lie pathways stretched through the rocks, seaweed strung through the gaps in place of ropes.

The inhabitants which hop over these watery pitfalls are brown and small like monkeys, with muzzles that slope off into a long curve like a horse's. These allow them to whinny softly at Tsubasa and Gelsadra as their pass over fish with seven-fingered hands, all of them with scales that flash like mirrors and Tsubasa can't help but marvel at the prism of sheer purple branching off these fins, letting off a soft 'uwah!' in appreciation. For a moment, it feels truly wonderful to be alive.

But as they wander, both her and Gel, across trails lined with eight-eyed crustaceans, they find blood spilled down into the cracks where their shoes meet darkness, and bodies washed onto stony lanes, placed there by hands rather than tides. And as Tsubasa, with trembling fingers, rolls them onto their sides, blood rushes out from between their teeth, slopping out in small streams of murky scarlet. All of these corpses, every one of them: drowned. But on land, with their lungs cranked to the brim with blood instead of water.

The blue mist rolls on and in, and Tsubasa shivers, nearly slips, before Gelsadra lifts an arm and launches a few sickles of wind round her waist, the tunnel of air shoving her foot back onto the rock before she trembles off entirely.

But then there is a jingle of a laugh, and Tsubasa blinks, turning to stare into the face of slack-jawed chaos. It grins, stares her down, the face of a madman present in its leer, all wrapped within the body of a brown-furred friend. And yet, from their hand, drips blood.

Tsubasa snaps.

'How could you!' she shouts. 'You're awful, absolutely awful!'

And then she becomes lost in her rage, in the red of her transformed Gatchaman suit as her sakura whips glance through the air in a fizz of pink. The swing through mist, cleaving it into colour as from beyond, she hears chatter, the other inhabitations becoming excited at the bobbing weave of the lightshow she sprinkles through the fog. But the flickering lights are not just for show, for no organic life-form can match a Gatchaman in speed. Within seconds, she pins him down, wrestling him to the rocks so hard she is sure he can feel the grit against his teeth.

'Why?' she demands, 'tell me why!'

He gurgles. Loses his smile. But not his laugh. His oh-so-familiar laugh. Tsubasa's fingers, her giant, oversized Gatcha-fingers clench into fur and muscles as he screams into her face.

'Shitty flower princess! Did you think you could swap a rock garden for the real world? Huh? Huuuuuuh? Idiot! Idiot, idiot, idiot.'

* * *

Surprisingly enough, the inhabitants aren't too keen on sharing their fish afterwards. And Tsubasa can't hold Katze, not when he can slip free of another's body so entirely and bleed out into the stars, out where the light will rip him of his sound, if not his substance.

But that, to Tsubasa, is fine. She has never seen Katze face to face, in his body after all, and now never will. No, to her, the scary thing about him is his voice and the way it chortles, delighting in its own meanness.

At least out there, in space, no one will have to listen to him _talk._ Until he finds the next world, that is.

She sighs, pressing seaweed more firmly into the side of the injured alien, red still running free of his palm.

'Can you tell them that it wasn't his fault?' she asks Gelsandra.

And he nods, turning to the gathering crowd to chirp out sounds that sound more like the tap of a drumstick against wood, than the words Tsubasa has heard in her own human tongue. But either way, at least the fur beneath her hand will stir with the breath of the formerly possessed. And as long as they can make the others believe, it will stay that way.

She sighs. They saw her turn into a Gatchaman. Next to that, what's a story about a disimbodied spirit worth?

* * *

'Katze was in Hajime,' Tsubasa says slowly hours afterwards, as they sail among the stars. 'But I guess that didn't mean he had to di-'

She falters, but holds herself steady on the dreaded word, pushing it out between her teeth as Gelsadra, eyes uncommonly sharp, wrestles her fingers back round the ceramic pot he gives her.

'-die.' She finishes firmly. 'I don't know how he was in Hajime in the first place. But he doesn't have a body anymore. Where else can he go?'

'Lots of places,' Gelsadra says, the lines on his face dipping down into a frown. 'Onto many, many worlds.'

Tsubasa looks up, out into the curved windows of the spacecraft. The blackness stares back at her, with no offer of blue to meet her eyes, not here, inside the gap between earth and the rest of the universe.

'We'll just have to save them all then,' she says decisively.

* * *

It is hard, saving things. Worlds especially. For Katze does not start wars. He simply murders, and never of course, with his invisible hands. It is always another who throws the first blow, who tosses cruel jibes into ears, even if their limbs, and their words, are not quite their own. But it is always strategic, placed within times designed for peace, like festivals or funereal services.

Tsubasa's blood runs cold at the symbolism.

She charges in, this time darting through pillars of black, a purple urn in the shape of a small bird, already spilling free of Katze's hands. He looks at her, a sneer perched on the trim tuck of his borrowed lips, as the wife of his borrowed body wails and clutches at his tasselled sleeves. With one, sharp, swing of movement, Katze reaches in, among her robes, and disembowels her.

Tsubasa screams - out of frustration, or of grief, she doesn't know which. And her strides become longer, fireworks sprinting from her fist as they fly out to gather round his head, blocking the downward arc of his arm as he yanks it free of the body and attempts to plunge it, like a needle, into the terrified face of a child nearby. He grins, surprised at her speed before, with a mad cackle, he is off once again, lifting free of that body with a few trailing sparks of red.

With Tsubasa left staring into the blood-flecked face of a child whose mother she could not save.

* * *

It is always the same. She charges in, each time preventing one last murder, before he flees and she is left there, standing, while family members yell at her, berating her in their alien language for not arriving sooner or for not moving quicker. Mostly for failing to save one last life. And it makes the breath in her chest stop, to think that once she promised the earth that she would always be there when tragedy was about to fall, arriving there in place of the CROWDS. Always on time, and never too late.

Gelsadra at least usually only gets blamed for collateral damage. His winds scratch buildings and LCD displays, tosses aside plant-life and one time, triangular-shaped boxes which Tsubasa thinks might have been bins. But he always cries afterwards.

'I'm sorry,' he yells this time, half-weeping as his arms wrap around her sides. 'They're so angry! I can't get them to listen!'

And her fingers find his hair, gliding into it as though it belongs to a pet.

'Good idea Gel-chan!' she says. 'It's time we get him to listen.'

* * *

She spends long hours scoring the surface of a moon nearby with her whips, helping to coax fireworks into fountain-like springs across the darkness of its craters, all to let them rain out like explosions. Each design is careful, well-timed, and traced out by memory from the sheets of paper she had liberated from her Great-grandfather's office before they left Earth. Gel-chan had watched her intently at the time, asking questions about colours and designs, and she had answered him half-heartedly, pencil trapped between her teeth.

'But how are you so sure, Tsubasa?' he had asked. 'Berg-Katze is so scary...how can you be sure he will be watching?'

'Um...' Tsubasa had paused and scratched her head. 'Instinct?' she offered lamely before laughing. 'No, I'm sure he'll be there. He talks like a villain, and acts like a despicable person...and I don't get why, but people like that, they always seem to be watching. Remember Suzuki Rizumu? He just sat back and watched Rue crawl through his own blood like...like...it was nothing.'

No, Katze will be here, laughing at her efforts, she is sure of it. For he haunts the stars they circle each hour like a phantom, his laugh tearing through their dreams as they curl together in the pilot's seat. He does not seem to care for the way Tsubasa's sleepy voice tries to ward Gelsandra against the guilt that shakes him awake each night.

'Don't worry, don't worry! Tomorrow, is a day full of new possibilities! You and me Gel-chan, we'll do the impossible. You'll see.'

But her words, small as they are, aren't strong enough for anyone anymore. So this time, she makes them big, spreads them across this moon's surface like an ice-skater writes lines through the ice.

 _WE MISS HER TOO._

Then she steps back, and prays.

* * *

He comes to her, snarling in the night.

'Stupid bitchy manure-head! Where's your ugly, crying face? Oh? No red-rimmed eyes, no panda look-a-like! Stuppiiid! You big liar! You're a hero now!'

Then the shouts dip down, morphing into a cruel, cold whisper, one slightly sultry at the edges as though there's a lust buried in there, all for something that longs to spring free.

'Uwah! I can save people, that's what a _true_ he-RO would do, not bother to stop and talk to people, not when I can charge and use my fists. I'm a true hero, not like _her_.'

Tsubasa's temper leaps up. Like a flame, it roars.

'You won't let me talk to anyone!' she explodes. 'You make it so that everyone's mad at me, but I'm not the only one to blame here, Mr Atmosphere! It's not just me, it's everyone! We all killed her.' Then she pauses. 'You can try and punish the universe for it. But it won't bring her back.'

'Stuuuupiiid,' Katze drawls. 'The universe is too big for me to take on. But you, you and your pretty, pre- _tae_ face are small enough for me to scar.'

'Go ahead,' says Tsubasa without meeting a beat. 'I'll chase you forever if that's what it takes. Focus everything on me; I deserve it. If Hajime's not here to give the attention you need, I'll gladly do it. But I won't be as nice as her, or as upbeat or friendly. So don't expect a miracle.'

There's a silence then and it stretches so long, that she fears she's lost him, this ghost who has drawn the cloak of a devil about him. But then out of the darkness, comes a whisper.

'Alright,' he croons, voice like honey. 'Alright, shitty flower princess. You got yourself a deal. I'll follow you, and I'll laugh when you fall.'


	3. Burn like a Phoenix

Tsubasa wins her last fight, like a star suffering death, the dazzling lights of the rainbow inside her Gatcha suit streaking and spurting like sparklers being doused in water. And Gelsadra catches her with a cry, his form covered by the dove-like spread of his cloak as it coats the sky. When it settles, his form is broader, leaner, supporting her with an adult's build, one strong enough to swallow down the weight of a coffin and keep it raised.

'Uwah!' she spits out. 'That was a tough one!'

And it had been. Katze has finally, finally found a form big enough to contain the swell of his anger, a creature that towered over the blue ferns that trembled as it rose. With granite for fists and diamonds for knuckles, it had run dents into the sides of Tsubasa's suit, forcing her back into a crouch, even as her whips flicked over its back with all the futile sting of a nettle leaf. And what was worse, Gel's giant tornados could hardly make it move, the force simply pressing the muddy twelve-tonne feet further back into the dirt with a slide.

It's enough to make her giggle now, to cough up the kind of red that will forever run darker than her suit. The kind that from within the dimension inside, stains her skin with a texture meant only for the interior of her veins. And she spares a moment to wonder if Hajime was the same, forced into a painting of loose dripping red against the dying sparkles of rainbows that flashed in front of her eyes.

'Sorry Katze,' she mutters. 'You'll have to find someone else to play with.'

'No Tsubasa-chan!' says Gelsadra, his voice a demand against her throat. 'No, no, no! I don't want this!' He glances up, tears rolling free of his eyes. 'Hajime said once that it was okay to say what I wanted. Not just what everyone else did. Only me. And **I** don't want this.'

* * *

Tsubasa floats free, she drifts, cased in winds strong enough to send her spinning.

'Shitty, shitty princess, come play with me, dear old Katze,' crones the voice, on the wrong side of the glass.

She murmurs, stuck halfway between Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. She is nestled, safe, warm, in white. Like a dove with a head tucked under its wing. But-

'No, Tsubasa,' Gelsadra says, hands touching her, the bones inside so much older than the ones she has kept coiled within her fists at night, back when he shook next to her with the nightmares she could so plainly _hear_. 'Stay here. We're safe here.'

Fingers run down her face, basking in the cool slide of her cheeks. And she shifts, turns, eyes half-open and directed towards the sky. But only his cloak finds her, the diamond-hewn holes filled in with buttons and beeps from inside the spaceship.

'Gel-chan, we should fight.'

'Rest Tsubasa. You deserve it.'

Katze watches this scene, this tableau of emotion and laughs. And laughs. And still laughs, even when the black hole swallows him down, twisting his atoms, and all the jittering gleaming sparks within them into tunnels that twist and spike, much like the winds Gelsadra calls through. The mocking trace of it dies out in seconds, frizzing out like a disrupted telephone cord, long before he is crushed and gone.

Gelsadra watches. Then turns.

'You were right, Tsubasa, he followed you. You never really saw him, but he followed you. He's scary, scary because he's like me.'

He sighs, knowing only seconds remain until the black hole drags them down. Then he flicks open the communication channel.

'Rui-kun, please come and get us.'

* * *

 _Tsubasa...tranport!_

 _Gelsadra...transport!_

* * *

Tsubasa stirs. She dreams. She breathes like she is alive, her breath falling and fading away to be renewed, restored, by the coursing tide of movement in her lungs. She is sallow and pale, like a person who cannot eat, wrapped in hospital sheets that weight her down, far more lightly than artificial gravity. They smell of fabric softener, the cheap, lavender scented sort.

Utsutsu pauses at the doorway, a flower wreath in her hands.

'I wished you had died instead of her,' she says, her voice strong and sure, not a hint of a quaver to impede its speed. 'That probably makes me a wicked person. But even so, right now, I want you to get better.' She stalks forward, her hand reaching for the other girl's arm. 'Hang in there,' she murmurs, light passing between them like a bead of gold running down a chain. 'There's nothing to forgive, not when I can't forgive myself. So come back. Hang in there, and come back.'

Tsubasa takes, what for her, feels like her first breath in a really long time. But she does not do it alone. This time, Gelsadra watches her, almost hungrily, his hand stretching across the sheets between them as he reaches for the heartbeat in her wrist.

'Tsubasa-chan,' he breathes, 'Hajime told me it was alright to want this. So you have to wake up. I don't understand the kind of person I will be, without you. I don't, no, I _won't_ get it at all.'

So she breathes again, awake, alive, nothing in her feeling like a star or a firework. She is simply...

 _'Maybe you should stop now,' Hajime had told her, against the backdrop of the rain, far, far too long ago. She had been kind then, the light of her yellow umbrella, filling in for the sun on that dark, drab day. More importantly, she had been alive._

 _Even in the cool of her memory, Tsubasa can remember her breathing._

Tsubasa wheezes. She is simply alive. And that is more than Hajime ever got.

'Sorry for worrying you,' she croaks.

She'll try to get it right, this time. She'll fight more, for Gel-chan to stay, for him to smile, for them to be...to be...

'Gel-chan, have you ever been to Disney world?'

At his quizzical look, she laughs. She can do this. She can breathe. And maybe, if she's lucky, this time no one will leave.


End file.
